


Pluck Up Your Hearts

by lzg



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Faustian Bargain, Horror, Mention of Mental Illness, Mention of possible suicide attempt, Multi, Spirits, ambiguous ending relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 17:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21165548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lzg/pseuds/lzg
Summary: Kent would have done anything to help Jack.That's kinda the problem.





	1. Jack & Bitty

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for, at various points:
> 
> Description of the aftermath of an overdose  
Description of a character's mindset before the overdose, which may or may not have been accidental  
Parse-positive, if you need to be warned for that

Going back to the Montreal apartment is a statement. Jack just isn’t sure what of. Seven years since he overdosed and died on the floor of the left hallway bathroom. Seven years since he woke up with a sore chest, cracked sternum, and fractured ribs from two frantic hockey players drumming a heartbeat back into him until professionals arrived and took over. Seven years of getting his life back on track until he can finally be comfortable in his skin.

Maman and Papa have ceded the city apartment to him, Bitty, Lardo, and Shitty for the week. They’ve been talking about selling the place. Making noises about a little house in a nice area. Even with the regular cleaning service, Jack sees the untouched patina over everything, can smell the still mustiness of unused rooms. He knows that they’ve preferred to stay in Le St-James when they overnight in the city ever since their only child died here, never mind that Maman has remodeled that bathroom half a dozen times over the years.

That’s why it’s such a surprise when someone unlocks and opens the door, taking a half-step in before freezing under the four sets of eyes turned his way.

“Kent?”

*****

Jack had spent one summer with Bitty, seeing Georgia, watching his boyfriend in the town he grew up in. This year, Bitty had pronounced it Jack’s turn. They’d flown into Montreal a few days ago after the NHL awards, meeting Shitty and Lardo and just taking some time to decompress.

The 2016 draft is wrapping up. All this season, people had been drawing parallels between the 2009 and 2015 drafts, asking Jack about the latest Canadian hockey savior, some prodigy out of Ontario, and the second overall pick, a blond American kid, the two of them generational talents. It was a little too much like before. But really, maybe it had been the best way to exorcise everything, to watch two different-yet-so-similar young men go to two different teams, neither the Falconers nor the Aces, and let life and hockey go on. This year they were able to watch the Draft without the old specters hanging over them.

Which is why seeing Kent Parson here is such a shock. He’d been at the NHL awards, of course, but kept his distance. Bitty had seen him once, staring at Jack, looking exhausted and resigned--even his acceptance speech was more subdued than his normal barely-contained gloating. But for someone who made being the center of attention an art form, Kent was certainly good at melting into the crowd whenever he saw Jack or Bitty coming near.

“Z—Jack, uh, I wasn’t expecting you here. And now, or ever, really.” Kent fumbles a set of key from the doorknob, starts unconsciously passing them from hand to hand as he stares.

“You have a key?” Bitty keeps his voice completely level, calm and politely inquisitive, as he comes up behind a dumbstruck Jack with a fresh bowl of popcorn from the kitchen.

“Um, yeah, Bad Dad—uh, Bob and Alicia said I could stay here when I’m in the city, and they, well.” Kent’s eyes dart toward the living room, Lardo and Shitty drawing closer. “You guys are full up, I’ll just head over to Henri-Dominique’s place in Laval for the week, open invitation there, too. His girls love their Oncle Kent. See you around maybe, huh Jack?” The shock that painted over his features is quickly melting away to his usual grinning mask, not leaving room for anyone to get a word in edgewise as he backs out.

When the door closes, the spell breaks. “Did that seem…odd to any of y’all?”

“Yeah, but to be honest, most of our interactions with Kent fucking Parson have not been what I would consider typical human contact.”

“No, something was just off.” Bitty’s brow crinkles for a moment before he realizes. “Where were his bags?”

“What?”

“You don’t travel two thousand miles for a week in a foreign city without at least a carry on. Not if you’re really planning on staying.” Jack meets his eyes as he feels something cold seep through him. Bitty may be seeing things, but tonight, of all nights, and this place, of all places... “Something’s wrong.”

Before the bowl hits the floor, Bitty is already throwing open the door and running out into the hall. “Parse! Wait!”

The apartment is at the far end of the corridor, as far from the elevators as possible. He sees Kent, about to step into an elevator, pause and give him a wave and a grin.

It’s not his usual smirk. It’s a rictus of bared teeth, eyes too wide above in a pale face, and Bitty knows, knows, they’ll never see Kent again. Then Kent’s gone, Bitty skidding to a stop in front of a closed door, pushing the button but he can hear the car moving down, knows that the stairs are the only way to catch him.

“Jack, stairs!” He’s flying down, hearing Jack and Shitty and Lardo clattering behind him, round and round the flights, bursting dizzily out into the empty side lobby. There’s something lazily rocking back and forth on the floor, and Bitty pauses for a moment to scoop it up. An Aces snapback, smelling of Parse’s hair gel and cologne. He has a sudden mental image of Parse running out the door, the wind blowing his hat off of his head, but not stopping him for a moment.

They race outside and stop. Le Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges stretches to their left and right, but at this time of night, there are no taxis, no way for Parse to make a quick getaway by auto. The road was cut into the hillside of Mont Royal, and even someone as athletic as Parse wouldn’t be able to scale the opposite rock face so quickly. Where the sheer drop tapers off, a fence stands tall, presenting the same problem.

“Shitty, Lardo, you head east, Bitty and I go west, call if you see—“

“Wait! There!” A gap between the fence and drop-off. Enough for a person to squeeze through, and Bitty sees it in his head again, Parse running across the road, running into the park. Sure enough, when he crosses the road, the streetlamps show a little path trampled down. Bitty pulls out his phone as they move deeper into the trees; it won’t be a lot of light, but he remembers nature trips with his father and cousins, remembers the tracking lessons.

“Call him, Jack. If his phone isn’t silent—“

“Right.” Jack doesn’t even protest that he doesn’t have the number, just pulls up the KVP contact and calls.

“Look, bro, are we sure that this is necessary? I mean, the Aces didn’t have the best season, but chasing him into Mont Royal park?”

“Shh.” Bitty can hear—something, further down the trail. He moves faster, the ringtone grows louder, until his light reveals a phone thrown to the side of the trail, ZIMMS blinking an incoming call.

Shitty’s face looks even paler in the wash of screen light. “Never mind.”

“His face, Shitty. He just looked like, like…like every light in the world was goin’ out.”

They come to a fork in the trail. Lardo has her phone out, map app up. “Right, we meet up with an established park path. Left, we go further into the wooded area.”

Before Jack can suggest splitting up again, Bitty feels a breeze across his face from the left. It’s cold, musty, the smell of old snow and ice. Not the scent of a park in June. “Left.”

They move faster now, feeling something cold and unnatural hanging in the air. In a few moments, they break through to a tiny glen formed by a downed tree. Parse is there, sitting on the rotting log, eyes wide and face slack and empty. Opposite him is a woman, quite literally carved from ice.

Maybe not so literally. Bitty finds himself clutching Jack’s arm as the ice woman turns toward them.


	2. Lardo

Lardo can’t be seeing this. This thing, woman, whatever, can’t be real. Lardo is a sculptor, solid surfaces of ice cannot bend like that, move like that.

The woman stands and moves toward them. Lardo wants to back up, they all do, but not if it means leaving Parson here. The part of her mind that isn’t gibbering notes that the woman’s dress hem brushes against acorns and leaves and moves them aside. So corporeal then, not an illusion or insubstantial.

“Who are you? What are you doing to Parson?” And apparently her non-lizard brain has seized control of her speech centers, too. _Yippee_, she thinks sourly as the thing’s face turns to her.

_Fulfilling our bargain_. The voice grates and crackles in her head, leaving behind a tenderness like someone scratching on her cerebellum.

“What bargain?” She’s never heard Jack’s voice so small, so shaken.

_Seven years of pain and then his life._

“What did he get in exchange?” Trust Shitty to want the details of the contract.

_His life_. It points to Jack.

“Non. Non, non, non, menteuse! Ne serait pas pour moi!”

Its head tilts toward Jack. Its face is perfectly sculpted, beautiful and crystalline, but the smile is full of ugly glee. _Let me show you_.

The trees dissolve into a bathroom. Jack—a younger version of him—lies unmoving on the floor, pills spilling across the tile in a blue arc to his hand. Dimly, she realizes that she’s too tall, that this isn’t her body, then agony rips through her chest. “Jack,” she whimpers and falls, “Jack!”

His body is cold under her too-large hands, eyes open and glazed, chest frozen. “Please, please, no, please, anything, I’ll do anything, give anything, please.” Her hands, Parson’s hands, tilt Jack’s head back, pinch his nose shut.

_He is dead little one. You cannot bring him back._

She startles, flailing back in the face of the bizarre ice woman who has just appeared in front of her. “What—how?”

_He is dead. But I can bring him back to you._

The pain is back, now accompanied by terror. “What do you want?”

_You_.

“My soul?”

Its laugh is a brittle, tinkling sound. _I have no use for your soul. But your life and your pain? I would feast on them._

She’s never felt despair like this, never. Her head turns back down the hallway, looks to the bedroom where Alicia and Bob must be, then sags to touch forehead to Jack’s chest. So still. “Do it.”

_I will have seven years of your pain, boy. Then you will return here, willingly, to give me your life._

Her fists are clenched in Jack’s shirt. “I said, do it.”

It smiles smugly, greedily, and sinks one hand into Jack’s chest and another into her head. _Agreed_. And she shouts for Bob as Jack spasms beneath her and the world falls away.

She hits the ground hard, shaking and freezing, unable to breathe. They’re all down, Shitty next to her, Jack and Bitty clinging to each other so hard she expects to hear bones crack.

The thing is standing back by Parson, playing with his hair, stroking it like a dog. _Would you like me to rescind our deal? You can back out, if you like. Jack will simply…die._

Parson is somehow aware, rolling his eyes up towards it, the only thing he can move. “Nnnnnooooo,” he hisses out.

_Would one of you make the sacrifice for him?_ It glides back toward them. _I’ll give you longer for him, eight, no, nine years. Nine years in your head, feeling your pain, then your life is mine._ Its grating shriek has transmuted to something else, a warmth calling out to accept, to lie down, to give in.

_Will you Jack? You loved him so until I took it away. Would you die for him?_

Jack’s eyes are huge, his body shaking under the strain before a sudden lassitude sets in. He’s actually going to…Lardo’s hand skitters through leaves and acorns until it wraps around the thickest branch she can reach. She brings it up hard into the thing’s face. Lardo may not be a hockey player, but she has the wiry strength of years of wrestling metal and equipment powered by rage distilled down into one instinct. This thing will not touch her boys.

The ice shatters away, revealing what lies beneath the shining, perfect white surface. A long-dead corpse’s face, shriveled and desiccated by air too cold and dry to let it putrefy, withered lips parting in a shriek as it rounds on Lardo. She scrambles back, branch at the ready, throws her head back and screams out into the night. “HELP US!”

And the largest fucking Canadian goose she’s ever seen smashes into the thing like an aerial check from behind. The thing tumbles, scrambling at the dirt, until a wolf lands on its chest, fangs gleaming, growling so low Lardo can feel the air vibrating against her fingertips.

“Enough.” And where the thing was ice over a corpse, this is a grizzly lumbering, no, a reindeer striding, no, a tall First Nations woman in an immaculate business suit stalking out of the dark. Lardo blinks, dazed, as the goose melts into a dark-skinned boy in a polo and boat shorts, flickers to a black and white hawk, shimmers back into a goose. The wolf paw is a buffalo hoof is the cowboy boot of a girl with a mad grin shining from under her Stetson hat. Something else, massive, moves through the forest towards them.

Lardo doesn’t care. She’ll take any help they can get.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Non. Non, non, non, menteuse! Ne serait pas pour moi!" - "No! No, no, no, liar! He wouldn't, not for me!"


	3. Shitty

The past few minutes have done wonders for Shitty’s world view. The supernatural is real, Kent traded his life to resurrect Jack, his beloved has heretofore-unknown demon ass-kicking skills. And here’s a moose. In the middle of Montreal.

Frankly, the moose is the hardest sell.

To his left, the kid with a strong resemblance to Ransom at his preppiest is hissing at the demon.

“You know the rules, parasite. You can only take what they give you.” His grin is sudden and dazzling. “Looks like she gave you a beating. Say thank you, and keep your claws to yourself.”

“Of course, if you would care to break the concord and open yourself to retaliation, we’d not dream of stopping you.” The woman’s voice and presence roll out over the glade, drawing every eye, cocking every ear.

“The icy filth is mine.” The man who has taken the moose’s place is bundled into flannel and furs, his face hidden under a scarf, the deep joual tinge to his voice sounding so much like Jack’s.

Faced with four – spirits? Angels? Genii loci? – the demon shrinks back as much as it can. _I offered them a deal_, it hisses and spits, _the same I offered to him. We made a deal, his pain and life for his lover returned, no more, no less. I kept **my** bargain_.

“Then keep to it.” The girl removes her boot and walks away, rolling her shoulders. “Collect him and go.”

“What? You can’t just let that it kill him! What the hell are you, protecting us and throwing him to a demon?” The woman turns to him, and he sees a bit of compassion in her eyes.

“There are rules, boy. Your Jack was dead, and she returned him to life. She could have demanded more of Kent, but she did not. The bargain was cruel, but fair. Unless she overstepped herself, we are not allowed to interfere.”

On the ground beside him, Bitty retches and tries not to sob. Jack has a bruising grip on his arm, but can’t seem to move his eyes from Kent, still seated passively and hopefully unaware.

“Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait.” He knows people like this demon, knows that their greed can never be satisfied, they will always bend the rules, lie and cheat and…steal. _Only take what they give you_. His smile is vicious and triumphant.

“You fucker. Just couldn’t resist it, could you? Just had to gobble up a little something extra, a little something to dig that shit in deeper, fuck him up more. You wanted Kent’s pain. No better fucking way to hurt him, am I right?”

The demon looks at him with the closest thing to panic he’s ever seen on an ice cube. When it tries to flee, it runs straight into the claws and beak of a goshawk, the fangs of a wolf, and whatever giant weasel-thing that mountain man turned into.

“It talked to Jack. It said, ‘_You loved him so until I took it away._’ Always struck me as a little funny how hung up Kent was, how desperate he was for Jack to pay attention to him if there’d never been anything there. Maybe not, huh?” The woman fractionally nods her head in the slightest respect, and it feels…pretty damned good, actually.

“Shitty?” He’s never heard Jack sound so confused, so broken. “She took, what, my f-feelings for him? But I never felt…” Jack trails off as the wolf tears something from the demon’s chest, something that looks like a candle flame would without a wick. The girl walks over to him, spattered with black foulness and holding the wavering flame in her hand.

“Someone was naughty.” Shitty isn’t the only one who shivers at the malicious joy in her voice. “This is yours. Want it back?”

Shitty can see Jack sway forward, reaching for it and then stop, glancing towards Bitty. “Bits, I don’t know, what if—“

Bitty smiles at Jack, sweet and sad, and pushes him toward the girl. “Go on now, Jack.”

In a move reminiscent of the demon from Kent’s memory, she slams her hand deep into Jack’s chest.


	4. The gang's all here

It looked like a tiny fire. It feels like so much more as his world goes silent and dark, then roars back in river of flames.

…seeing a boy, beautiful and friendly, so very confident, smiling at him, welcoming, yanking him into an ecstatic celly in their first scrimmage…

…listening from around the corner as Kenny tore into three teammates who’d been cruel to him, mocking his weight, his reserve, how he failed his father’s legacy…

…feeling arms around him, that voice telling him that if he blew the game, every player on that shootout, Kent included, blew it too, and their goalie, and that Jack’s two goals were the only reason they lasted into overtime…

…watching him sleep the first night they’d had sex, wondering why, of all the people he could have had, Kenny chose him…

…fantasizing in the soppiest way about teaching their children to skate at the pond by Gra’pere’s house…

…looking at Kenny before the playoff run, murmuring “Kenny, you know, right? You know what I…”, not able to complete it, but Kenny smiling so warm and soft up at him and replying “Yeah, Zimms, I know.”…

…greedily savoring every perfect moment of the summer before the draft, mourning that they would never play together again, never have this uncomplicated freedom ever again…

…shaking in the bathroom, the night before the draft, knowing he would never be able to make it without Kenny, knowing that Kenny can’t be torn between Jack and his team, knowing that all he can do is bring him down…

…seven years of turning away, uncomprehending, every time he saw Kent, of anger because it had been nothing, simply young lust and hormones reacting from proximity, and Kent **_just could not let it go_**…

…and his back bows as every last spark of his stolen love crashes back into his mind and soul, coursing through the old channels and burning new ones through him.

“Excellent, you’ll live after all.” The girl’s crazed grin spreads above him, not at all comforting, but beyond her, to either side, are far more welcome sights.

“Kenny. Bitty.”

Bitty would never be so impolite as to shove a helpful spirit. Nudging her gently yet firmly out of the way is not out of the question though. “Jack? Are you all right?”

Kenny just clutches one of Jack’s hands and one of Bitty’s hands, eyes bright and filled with endless relief.

*******************************************

Lardo and Shitty sit together, holding on too tightly for either of them to shake apart.

Lardo feels a downy brush against her mind. _Nicely done, bro. Someday, when you need the pure fire in your guts to beat the shit out of whatever’s in your way, it’ll be there for you._ She looks up in time to see the goose take lumbering flight.

Shitty feels a palpable weight of regard and sees the woman smiling faintly at him. _Well spoken, young man. Someday, when the words matter more than anything, you’ll find them_. The grizzly lumbers back out into the dark, a dirty-white scrap trailing from its jaws.

The faintest needle-thin keening seems to float back to them, but they turn toward each other and obliterate it from their minds.

*******************************************

Bitty, Kent, and Jack look up at the panting wolf. It huffs a laugh. _Consider yourself rewarded. Although if you want another gift from me—_

“No!”

The wolf’s jaw drops in a grin and it lopes out of the clearing. They turn to the only remaining spirit, who after a moment bends down and touches a mittened hand to Bitty’s head before dissipating into a gust of snow.

“Bits? Did he say anything?”

Bitty’s eyes are wide as he turns back to them. “Yeah. ‘Good tracking, kiddo. Someday, when you need to find your way, you will. And I expect that’ll be sooner rather than later.’ What—d’you know what he meant by that?”

Jack looks at the grip Bitty is maintaining on Kenny’s hand, lifts his eyes to meet Kenny’s gaze.

“I might have an idea.” There is a moment of the most horrible realization. “Oh shit, Uncle Jaro was right.” He chuckles ruefully at their confused expressions. “Me and papa do have the same type: Mouthy blond Americans.”

If the laughter has a touch of hysteria in it, they’re frankly entitled.

**Author's Note:**

> No lie, the pretentiousness of this burns a little. (So...many...adjectives and adverbs...it's like a sickness)


End file.
